The Moment I Say “Syria”

The question lands like a small alarm with a smile:

Who are you?
Or where are you from?

I’ve learned how quickly the answer can flip a room.

There’s always a beat before I say it. A soft, private breath. Then I offer the word that has framed me for so long: Syria.

Things change.

The eyes do a quick scan, like they’re searching my face for a headline they once read. The shoulders shift; sometimes they sink, sometimes they square. A half-step eases back, barely there, but I feel it the way you feel a draft from a door you didn’t know was open. The conversation, which was just moments ago about coffee or weather or whatever we were both pretending to care about, slides into a new lane. I become a country. They become a border guard.

I notice the choreography every time: the stare, the shoulders, the step back. Sometimes it’s subtle, only a flick of surprise before the face rearranges into polite. Other times it’s clumsy, a too-loud “Oh!” followed by a scramble for one of the three safe questions people keep for my country: Is it safe? Do you still have family there? When did you leave? I answer what I’m willing to answer. I tuck the rest away.

I can feel the questions gathering behind their teeth.
I can feel my answers retreating to the places I keep them safe.

I wasn’t always like this. There was a version of me who thought pouring the whole story on the table proved something; honesty, courage, maybe even belonging. I learned the hard way that not everyone wants the story. Some people just want the proof. The stamp. The easy box to put me in. None of this makes me smaller in my own eyes. But it does make me careful.

Here’s what doesn’t happen, almost never in that first minute: no one asks me about the smell of the streets after rain, or the taste of apricots warm from the market. No one asks about the neighborhood barber who knew everyone’s name, or the way the jasmine climbs the balcony railings in June as if it, too, is trying to see the sea. Those truths don’t fit into the shape of their curiosity. So I keep them. I keep them bright.

Living abroad means carrying a passport on my tongue. It means deciding, again and again, how much to declare at customs. On some days I answer with the broadest, clearest line (Syria) and let the silence do its work. On others I say I’m from “the eastern side of the Mediterranean” and watch the question float past without finding a hook. Neither is a lie. Both are true enough. I choose what is right for the room and for my ribs. I offer what the moment can carry. Not because I’m ashamed, never that, but because my truth deserves rooms that can hold its weight.

I don’t blame the question. I blame the hunger behind it; the need to locate and classify before we learn to see. I’ve done it too, in other ways, with other people, in other rooms. We like our stories tidy, our maps color-coded. But I am not a clean outline. I am the scribbles and the margins and the notes written in two languages on the same page. I am the laughter that arrives late and the tears that won’t be scheduled. I am the parts of my country that don’t make the news.

Who am I? I’m the person who knows what those three little shifts feel like and keeps walking anyway. I’m the one who has learned to carry both the passport and the garden, paper and petals, and decide, with care, which one to show. I’m the one who can say Syria without flinching and also leave entire chapters unwritten on my tongue because I know whose hands are gentle enough to hold them.

The question still arrives. It will always arrive. And I will always answer; just not always the same way.

I am from Syria.
Things change.
I do not.